[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[Richard Pruss]

On 31/05/2010, at 11:12 AM, Noel Butler wrote:

> I see no valid reason as to why they need to do this in the first place. They come across as creepy snoops, it may only be morally wrong to "drive around with full intent to record any and all wireless AP SSID's", but none the less, they should be spanked for it.

I see a perfectly valid reasons.  Google could publish a map of open Wifi nodes.  In places where there are no bandwidth Cap; fully open WiFi nodes are common.
It's considered to be neighbourly to open your WiFi and it some what protects you against government accusations of  piracy as who was using the WiFi in
open WiFi is hard to pin down.  In places like that a map is useful.  Where can I get open access around here.

But there is an even better use case, which I would use.  Show me a map of all coffee shops in 5 km's that have open wifi access.

As for there explanation of why they captured packets off the wifi nodes - I am sure it makes sense to anyone who operates in a big company, it boils down to
someone reused some code, it did more than they wanted but it did the job and they saw no harm.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html  
"
So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.
"

Given the ethics requirements in big companies I find the sinister theories unlikely.
Do not assume malice when simple incompetence will suffice.

- Ric

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20100531/6f06b564/attachment.html>